The Dodgers’ Yasiel Puig celebrates after reaching third base during the fourth inning of Game 2 of the NLDS on Saturday night at Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers weren’t shut down by Diamondbacks starter Robbie Ray as some expected they might be. (Photo by John McCoy, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

LOS ANGELES — This Division Series will not be ruled by a starting pitcher, the way they all once were.

Robbie Ray of Arizona had a chance to take those reins and herd those Dodgers into uncomfortable corners. Circumstances, including those created by his own team, denied him that.

Pitching with two days’ rest after a relief appearance Wednesday, Ray had his speed but not his direction in Game 2, and the Dodgers didn’t let him escape the fifth inning. They went on to overcome some bullpen mishaps of their own and win, 8-5, and take a 2-0 lead to Phoenix for Monday’s Game 3. One more win in any of the next three games takes them into the National League Championship Series for the second consecutive year.

Real Dodger Stadium veterans looked at Ray’s enormous success against the Dodgers this year and were transported back to 1966.

A St. Louis left-hander named Larry Jaster faced the Dodgers five times that season. He shut them out five times, too.

Jaster beat Don Drysdale and Claude Osteen twice apiece. He beat Don Sutton. He gave up 24 hits in 45 innings. And that was against a National League championship team.

Other pitchers have hexed the Blue over the years, but few could approach Jaster until Ray came along in 2017.

The lefty from suburban Nashville was 3-0 against the Dodgers with a 2.27 ERA and struck out 53 in 31-2/3 innings. He dominated them in back-to-back outings in late summer, as the Diamondbacks were in the process of beating L.A. six consecutive times.

He was going to be Arizona’s trump card in an NLDS, because obviously he would pitch Game 1 and reduce the Dodgers to blue play-doh.

Which is why many people around the Dodgers blinked Wednesday night when Ray came out of the Arizona dugout during the wild-card win over Colorado.

Ray threw 34 pitches in relief in what became a 11-8 victory. It was 6-4 when he entered the game in the fourth inning. He left with two out in the sixth, and his baserunner scored to cut it to 6-5. But he had cut through the heart of the Colorado lineup to preserve the lead.

There were those who said Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo called it exactly right, that there was no need to save Ray for the Dodgers if Arizona didn’t survive the Rockies. And that’s true, of course.

But it forced Lovullo to use Taijuan Walker in Game 1, and Walker was shelled for four runs in the only inning he worked. The Diamondbacks lost, 9-5, on a night when they crashed four home runs off a beatable Clayton Kershaw.

You can dissect it to its innards, but the fact was that Ray didn’t have it on Saturday. At least not his usual command. He ducked and dodged through three hitless innings as he walked four.

Chris Taylor then put the Dodgers up 3-2 with a hard shot that shortstop Ketel Marte could only glove. Ray was gone, two batters into the fifth, and Forsythe lifted a single off rookie Jimmie Sherfy to make it 4-2.

Then Barnes, whose season-long emergence has made him the 1-A catcher, steered a two-run double down the left-field line off Sherfy.

It was a tough homecoming for Sherfy, who pitched for George Horton at Oregon and is the son of Brad Sherfy, the former UCLA golf coach and a club pro at Moorpark.

Jimmie Sherfy had played youth baseball with Lovullo’s son Nick, who is now in the Red Sox organization, and Lovullo called it an emotional moment when he handed the ball to Sherfy at the end of Game 1.

There were no moist eyes in the Arizona dugout when Sherfy left and Jorge De La Rosa came in, to give up an RBI single to Puig, his fourth hit of the series so far. That capped the four-run inning and allowed Puig to amuse the crowd by getting picked off first base and thrown out at second.

A three-run, first-pitch home run by Brandon Drury greeted Brandon Morrow in the Diamondbacks’ seventh inning and cut it to 7-5.

Ray wound up throwing 88 pitches, three of them wild, only 54 of them strikes. Again, a prominent starting pitcher had been pulled from his accustomed habits, thanks to the desperation of the playoffs. You win 93 games doing things one way and you try to win the most important games with a whole new plan. It was a mistake that a 5-game series rarely forgives.

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